Slack Releases Standalone App For Windows

After months of requests, Slack has released a standalone app for Windows. Until now, those on Windows machines could only use Slack through a browser. The app is fast and provides a similar user experience to its Mac counterpart. It works on Windows 7 and above, including the Windows 10 preview.

Slack on Windows

Instead of using a browser tab for each team you’re connected to, the app has a team switcher on the left sidebar. Each team has its own notification count and you can easily switch between them using keyboard shortcuts.

There’s a few other features as well, but the most important one for me is its performance. When I used Slack in FireFox, it routinely bogged down the browser to the point of having to close it. Now that Slack is a standalone app on Windows, I don’t have to worry about my browser slowing to a crawl. It’s also nice to be able to run Slack in the background without it using a lot of resources.

With more than 30% of Slack’s users running Windows, it’s nice to finally have an option that’s on par with the experience Mac users have enjoyed for months.

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9 Comments

That’s good news. I’m not a fan of Slack at all, but when I have to use it, the web client is impossible to interact with in the long run, given the performance of most major browsers that you use for other things as well.

As a Linux user myself, I’m curious whether they’ll also run a stable version that is multiplatform, or at least not focused on Windows or Mac OS only.

It very much looks and behaves like it is a wrapper around the web interface.Whether it is or not, can’t say for sure.

That said, I switched back to the web interface because I can use custom stylesheets on there, and I can’t on the “native” version. The normal interface, with the black text on the white, is basically unusable by me. It’s just blinding and difficult to work with. Slack severely needs a “night mode”, and with some custom styling, I was able to make the web version actually usable and useful.

That said, I have not had any freezing or slowdown issues with the web version in Chrome. I can leave it running for days at a time and it’s just fine.

I’ve heard from other fellows that it is slower than the web version, which is surprising for me (it’s a tough goal to beat). And yes, using custom stylesheets and such is a benefit of apparently the faster equivalent being the web version.

IIRC you had a Chromebook, if that’s what you use, that may explain the fast load on Chrome, other than that most people around me have been struggling with the CPU and RAM usage of Chrome (it’s another story though).

This was one of the things I kept bugging them about because the web client was just unusable. It would freeze way too often.

Thankfully they listened and even invited me to their super early beta phase, so I can stop complaining lol..I have been using it for some time and it’s awesome. Gives me the same kind of experience that I have on my Mac :)